Evening Everyone,

Hope you’re all well and having a good week. The days are flying by for me at the moment, I can’t believe we’re about to hit another weekend. I’m not complaining as the days moving fast right now means I’m closer to my birthday; 8 more sleeps, not that I’m counting.

Books 📖

Thank you to @hqstories and @helenmonkstakhar for this copy of Such a Good Mother in return for an honest review. Such a Good Mother was published on 21st July 2022 and you can get a copy here.

Description 🔖

There is nothing Rose O’Connell wants more than to be a perfect mother. After enrolling her son at the most sought after primary school in the area, she’s unexpectedly recruited into “The Circle”; a group of women who run the school and have it all. Due to Rose’s desire to have it all too, she joins them and is willing to overlook some questionable things in order to climb up the social ladder.

Things like, where does all of their money come from and why did one of the mother’s take her own life and what made them pick Rose in particular? Rose is soon to find out that having it all comes at a cost.

General Thoughts 🤔

I had been looking forward to reading this book for a few reasons; I liked the cover, I enjoyed this author’s last book and the blurb sounded interesting. I will admit that this book wasn’t quite as good as Precious You in my opinion (review here), but it was enjoyable. I liked the concept of the book; a woman who hasn’t got much, surrounded my woman that have a lot and how far will she go to be like them. It turned out that Rose would go a lot further than I initially thought she would.

Characters 👫👭👬

The main character Rose was flawed in many ways, but I couldn’t help but feel bad for her. She spent a lot of time feeling less than, so I did kind of feel happy for her when she started to climb the social ladder. However I do think that she took it too far. She started to make bad priority decisions and it was at this point that my sympathy for her withered away.

I really liked Rose’s husband Pete. He was a sweet man who seemed to be content with his lot in life, albeit he was lacking some ambition and drive. There was some back story there that I would have liked to have read a little bit more about.

Writing Style ✍️

There were parts of this story that I did think were very relatable. Everyone judges each other at the school gate (whether they admit it or not). There were also parts of this story that I don’t think were relatable for the majority of society, however I did think they were believable. I liked the way that the author mixed the two of these together to create a story that I could see myself in, but with some drama sprinkled on top.

I think that the majority of the book was well paced, however there was a lot of unravelling in the last 3-5 chapters. I think that this could have happened a little earlier maybe or been extended out to create a bit more tension.

Conclusion & Scoring 🎖

Overall I thought that this was an enjoyable read. It didn’t grab and hold me as dramatically as I was anticipating it to, however it was a good steady burn of a story with some interesting characters and an intriguing plot. I would recommend this book for some relatively easy reading.

😍😍😍😩😩